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Saturday, October 31, 2015

If you've been reading along since the beginning, you'll know that I'm a huge #openaccess fan, and, really, am something of an oversharer. When I began my scientific career, I was posting all of my work on the qBio section of the arXiv. Me and some colleagues responded to the increase in utilisation of #preprint servers by making Warburg's Lens, a blog inspired by Haldane's Sieve to help aggregate mathematical oncology pre-prints, and allow for discussion. We've had a ton of success with Warburg's Lens, and it has been helpful for many folks. One of the nice aspects of it, that the arXiv didn't have, was the ability to comment, and to link in to social media in general.

This past summer, at the annual Society for Mathematical Biology Meeting, I gave a talk on pre-print servers and social media in science. While I was preparing for the talk, I ran across a great infographic about the arXiv and was blown away how LITTLE qBio there actually is... (something like 1.6% - TONS MORE info here)

Anyways, I recently asked Richard if there were any stats on publications/utilization of the bioRxiv. At the time, there were no stats done, but today I saw on this twitter:

Within just a year, more than half have been published! Good news. I'm hoping that my newest preprint (which is also on Warburgs Lens here) joins the majority ASAP :)

Anyways, I'm heartened to see the increase in utilisation. I have to say, having submitted I think 6 manuscripts to the bioRxiv, and around the same number to the arXiv, the process at the bioRxiv is MUCH easier. It can be done in minutes, rather than fighting with the LaTeX compiler on the arXiv istelf. My current practice is to send everything to the bioRxiv, though I still read and monitor the qBio section of the arXiv... what are your practices?

Thursday, October 22, 2015

For a few years now I've been interested in evolutionary graph theory - a branch of mathematics at the nexus of evolutionary dynamics and graph theory. To my knowledge this was all kicked off by Martin Nowak and colleagues with the 2005 Nature paper: Evolutionary Dynamics on Graphs. One of the coolest results was that certain graph topologies exhibit striking changes in probabilities of fixation (assuming a Moran process) - particularly symmetric graphs called 'stars'.

A beautiful follow on paper by our friends at the Max Planck for evolutionary biology, led by +Arne Traulsen showed that this amplification of probability of selection led to a dramatic increase in time to fixation - sort of balancing out the advantage. You can read more about this in this terse paper in the Royal Society B entitled: The effect of population structure on the rate of evolution.

Further, at the recent conference: Cancer Evolution Through Space and Time the conversation continued and we started talking more about 'mixed' topology structures. The conversation has continued on twitter, culminating with a new student in my lab +Sudhir Manickavel starting some work simulating evolution. Here's where our thinking is going:

When he first started considering this project +Sudhir Manickavel , a medical student asked of the Royal Society paper mentioned above:

"I read the paper and I found it interesting, especially the idea that even though star structured populations have a greater fixation probability it actually takes them longer to fix.

I do have one question about the paper, in reference to a tumor how would you define a tumor population as well mixed or star structured?"

A great question... to which I responded:

"What is the topology of an epithelial sheet? What is the topology of a colonic crypt? Does the topology of the stem cell niche within the crypt differ from that of the walls of the crypt? How would you characterize the topology of bone marrow? Or - in infectious diasese: Of a blood borne pathogen? Of a biofilm?"

And included a link to a Gatenby classic which opens with:

"The human body plays with evolutionary fire" and discusses the unique (changing) topology of the colonic crypt and how this may influece evolutionary dynamics...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3744108/

Which seemed to sell him on the topic as just this morning, I looked in my dropbox, and it looks like +Sudhir Manickavel is making some progress (though there seems to be a missing node... :) ):

initial condition plotted with networkx to study the moran process evolving on a 'mixed' topology structure... is it a ring or is it a star?

Sunday, September 27, 2015

My friend, supervisor and department Chair +Alexander Anderson compiled a full storification of the recent Cancer Evolution Through Space and Time meeting with the hashtag #CEST15.

You can find it on his storify page here:

https://storify.com/ara_anderson/cancer-evolution-through-space-time

but I've also embedded it below. It was an AMAZING week bringing together folks from the bacterial evolution community, game theorists and the cancer evolution world (theory, experiment and genomics). I've already heard calls to repeat the meeting next year. Personally, I can't wait to follow up on the relationships I made, which are myriad!

Thanks to Sandy and +Arne Traulsen and all the crew at The Max Planck for Evolutionary Biology who made the visit so nice. Enjoy the storification that Sandy compiled.

It is a spatial cellular automaton model (beautifully visualized) that looks at cancer growth and migration in a 3-d spatial context. The authors did a good job citing appopriate work (>100 citations) and never made any claims that were over the top. The press release, however... well... I'll let the twitter backlash speak.

I think the most striking thing about all of this was the the senior author, Martin Nowak, one of the fathers of evolutionary dynamics and most successful mathematical biologists in the world, came on to twitter to apologize for the Press Release (see final tweet). Class move.

At the end of the day, we have little control of the press releases for our papers. And, while we certainly all want to see our work publicized (how else can people find out about it?), seeing good work cheapened in some way by an oversold press release doesn't help anyone.

Anyways, here is a tour of spatial models of cancer, twitter style. #notthe1sttime

@CancerConnector A single PDF at 1st submission is ok but needs to be changed at revisions. Will contact you by e-mail.
— PLOS Comp Biol (@PLOSCompBiol) April 13, 2015

Anyways, they replied quickly with an email as well stating:

We allow a single PDF to be submitted at initial submission, although as the paper is subsequently revised, we require the manuscript to be submitted in separate parts to begin to prepare the manuscript for production. This is to avoid asking authors to do everything at once at acceptance, a process that can, in some instances, be a substantial task.

I understand that this is not clear on the author instructions and we are looking at ways of improving our instructions.

So - submit away. And, thank for the quick reply to PLoS CB... now it's just fingers crossed for our submission.

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Many apologies for the long delay in writing, residency training has been weighing heavily on my creative time - but this is coming to an end! In the realm of more good news, on July 1st I will assume the post of Clinical Instructor here at the Moffitt Cancer Center, concentrating my efforts on taking care of patients with sarcoma using radiation for one day per week. The balance of my time will be spent finishing my DPhil and pursuing the clinician-scientist track - a balance I hope to maintain for the rest of my career (life?).

Dendritic Swarm.

My relationship with the Sarcoma department here has been a very good one, and one that has transcended simply training and patient care. Immediately before I left for Oxford, my neighbor and friend +Ray Paul came to my house and asked me to feel a lump on his side...

It turned out that Ray had a myxofibrosarcoma, and a nasty one at that. Honestly, things looked pretty bleak for a while, but now, after 4 surgeries (flank, thigh, and two in the lung), two bouts of radiation therapy (flank and thigh), two clinical trials (immunotherapy and a novel tyrosine kinase inhibitor) he is NED - nearly 4 years later. Incredible, and wonderful.

Each of the paintings that Ray has made during this journey has had more than just Ray's hands involved. Indeed, to make the paintings as you see them, a surgeon had to cut out his tumor, a pathologist had to stain and mount the tissue and a screen printer had to prepare the canvas. As an offshoot of this collaboration, our Sarcoma pathologist, Marilyn Bui, and Ray continued to talk and brainstorm, and a new project was born, a book entitled Healing Art of Pathology.

SP12-6796 x 40 - 2

Sponsored by the College of American Pathologists, this book will be a compilation of art derived from, or inspired by, pathology - the study of disease. They are seeking submissions now, with a deadline of September 1st from the art and medical world (including patients) the world over. More details can be found in the attached letter.

"Please send all submissions and/or address any questions to Caryn Tursky, CAP Press Acquisitions and Development Editor, at ctursky@cap.org by September 1, 2015. Please make the subject of the email “Healing Art Submission.”"

I approach the understanding of cancer like my original training in physics taught me - from the ground up, using the descriptive language of mathematics. Using established mathematics in new ways, guided by the principles of evolution, I hope to better understand (and maybe treat!) cancer. I am a proud member of the Integrated Mathematical Oncology group at the Moffitt Cancer Center and the Centre for Mathematical Biology at Oxford University.